Intervention (write of passage number fifty-four)

The Resident Fan Boy was zoning out on the bus, so at first didn't hear the voice from the seat behind him.

"Hello?  Excuse me?"

A waving hand appeared near his ear.

The woman, having his attention, leaned forward.

"There are lots of free seats on this bus."

The RFB turned slightly, so as not to disturb younger daughter, who was gazing out the window, and fidgeting slightly.  The bus was, indeed, nearly empty. He fixed the woman with a quizzical gaze.

"And your point is?"

"Well, you're making people uncomfortable."

While the RFB was processing the implication, younger daughter spoke up.

"No, you're not!" she declared, ignoring the woman completely.  "You're my dad!"

Nothing further was heard for the rest of the trip.

On hearing this story (and having been questioned by strangers more than once myself), I gently pointed out that if younger daughter had been on her own, with an unwelcome man sitting next to her (which has happened), perhaps someone should issue a challenge.

The RFB agreed - a tad begrudgingly - and younger daughter called warningly from her bedroom.  She doesn't like being discussed, and her hearing is acute beyond belief.

The road not taken

Walking home from the drug store, I decide to incorporate my route to my former home with my present home, descending into Fairfield via tree-lined and still leafy Vancouver Street.

I'm somewhere behind the cathedral, when I hear an exchange taking place behind me, between a child and a man: high voice/deep voice, high voice/deep voice:
"Guess what?"
"What?"
"Guess what?"
"What?"

This continues as they overtake me, a young dad and his colt-legged daughter, clad in a hoodie and leggings, dragging a long stick along the pavement.

Pang.

Two decades ago, elder daughter was seven, and would have come down this hill with her dad countless times, and much in this vein.

I'm rather relieved when this current-day pair lope past the turning which leads to our old house.

That might break my heart.

A shadow of his former self

Oh, I had noble plans. I had the day mapped out. Then I ran into my father. The one who has been dead for six years. The one I haven't seen for many more years than that.

I have a British subscription to Find My Past, but the site is offering free world-wide access this weekend, so before embarking on the day's activities, I tried entering some familiar names. I stumbled across three articles about my dad, two with pictures, all from Bay Area newspapers which is where he settled after he left us for the final time. The articles themselves didn't contain anything of which I wasn't aware; they concerned his involvement with the local branches of Junior Achievement and the American Diabetes Association.

I wasn't prepared for the heavy sad feeling somewhere below my heart. In the first photo, he is back-lit in a group of four men, but I instantly recognized his stance, his posture and the shape of his head. It was taken when I was about the same age as younger daughter is now, and struggling through a haze of depression in the final months of high school. I noticed with another small shock, that the photo had appeared in the San Mateo Times. My aunt, my mother's sister, lived in San Mateo for many years.

The second photo was taken three years later, after I had decided, based on a dream I'd had, that he had died. I was staying with a family friend in Muswell Hill, in the house he'd often visited with my mother, and was haunted by what I had imagined were vestiges of him. The photo is crystal clear. He is unmistakeable.

It took me a while, but I recovered and got on with my day. I didn't weep. I saved the articles and archived them until I can decide a safer place to store them. As I have mentioned in this blog before, a number of people need to be safely off the planet before I can tell his story to those who remain.

Grief, it seems, takes strange shapes, as tangible as a knot in the stomach and insubstantial as a shadow. It returns in a different form every time.

Psychopaths I have known

Last autumn, I came across this article in the Globe and Mail which includes an interview with author Kevin Dutton and an overview of his book The Wisdom of Psychopaths. I felt a dropping in my stomach as I read it, because at the end of the article were two lists: one denoting leadership traits, the other the corresponding psychopathic traits. The first list came fairly close to describing my father. The second list pretty much nailed him. I sat in a mild state of shock for a few minutes, then logged into my local library's web site and put a hold on the book.

Dr Kevin Dutton begins The Wisdom of Psychopaths with tales of his own father and his father's audacity. Neither Dutton's dad nor mine was a serial killer (so far as I know). This is the point. We use the term "psychopath" as a synonym for "serial killer". This isn't so, and Dutton is by no means the first person to make this point. Most of us probably personally know people living with autism, Parkinson's Disease or schizophrenia. (I certainly do.) Why wouldn't we also know functional psychopaths?

Dutton describes how the very qualities that help politicians, surgeons, military intelligence operatives, CEOs and sales people rise in their professions and succeed in what they need to do are similar to traits shared by some of the most dangerous people in our society. He calls these "The Seven Deadly Wins": ruthlessness, charm, focus, mental toughness, fearlessness, mindfulness (as in living in the here and now), and action ("Psychopaths," Dutton declares, "never procrastinate.").

As I read, I thought of the possible psychopaths I'd encountered in my own life: a boy at school who could turn friendliness on and off like a tap, a teaching partner whose relationships with the students we shared made me uneasy, at least two of the Resident Fan Boy's bosses, and yes, my own charming, reckless, and heartless father.

I admit, though, I'm nothing but an armchair psychologist and this book, written in a glib, popular-science style, is nothing more than food for thought. An interesting read, but not something on which to base your life philosophy. Unless, like a psychopath, you have little in the way of a conscience.

Père Pressure

Father's Day has been a bit of a challenge this year. For starters, we celebrated it last Sunday. We didn't mean to; it was just in the kerfuffle of younger daughter's birthday party, I got convinced that June 14th was Father's Day and no one told me different until Thursday, when elder daughter heard something on the TV while studying and checked her calendar. The pity of it was that I was totally bagged last Sunday and while struggling to finish the tie-dyed tee-shirts from the party and distribute them, failed to do much more than give him a card.

Then there's the matter of dealing with the fallout of my own father's death in January and the tragic travesty (to coin an oxymoron) of his memorial service in April. I spent what seemed a large chunk of May composing a letter to my paternal aunt in response to her kindly-meant but rather pious and platitudinous card and follow-up letter. I've had no response to that, but I focused entirely on my good memories, and where he succeeded as a father.

And how do you succeed as a father? A home-spun kind of answer comes in this song by R. Binn and J. Moore (I don't seem to be able to find out more about them) as interpreted by the late great Chet Atkins. Whatever you may think of country music (and it seems to be chic to declare disdain for it), this is quite a performance by a great artist, as he finds the voice of the little boy that dwells within most men: "He always took care of me. He always had time for me." You can catch a glimpse of several famous people during this video, including Vince Gill and Mark Knopfler.


I'll dedicate this to my father's better nature, and to the Resident Fan Boy himself, who, for the record, succeeds as a father and as a human being.

Where is the life that late he led?

I have been circling around this subject for days, wondering how to write about it. Re-reading Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" was not a good idea.... I will circle some more.

Last week, I was watching an episode of Lark Rise to Candleford a television series loosely (very loosely) based on the novels by Flora Thompson which were favourites of my maternal grandmother. The series itself is gentle and charming, not all that much to do with the original stories, but pleasant enough viewing. This episode focused on the fussy Pratt sisters who run a dress shop. When their prodigal father showed up, begging for forgiveness for deserting them as children, I felt a familiar sinking in my stomach and knew long before the denouement that he would betray them again.

My father's memorial service took place in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. It apparently was a grand affair. I knew it was going to take place because my eldest half-sister (from my dad's first marriage) was attending. About a week later, I received a message through Ancestry.co.uk where I've been steadily posting my family tree in safe-keeping against the possibility of our home computer going "foom", as it seems to do every couple of years. A very sweet lady from San Francisco was wondering who on earth I was. Apparently she'd come across my family tree during her own family research and, making conversation at my father's service, asked my half-sister and my father's last wife about it. Blank looks. Neither I nor my sister had appeared in the list of relatives in the programme. When the kind lady offered to mail me the order of service, I finally fully understood why.

See, I'd expected some fabrication in my father's obituary. A few years ago, a local newspaper had reported on one of his functions and mentioned the medals on his chest and the fact that he had modestly said: "They're not for anything much." Oh God. They had no idea.

I started to read through the rather lengthy 8x10 pamphlet that had been sent me. My hands first began to shake when I saw the title by his name: Lt.Col. I flipped to the back and was confronted by a two-page (single-spaced) biography which enumerated in glowing adjectives achievement after achievement, heroism after heroism which I knew to be simply not true. I don't know who wrote this thing, but it was a skillful weaving of fact, fiction and half-truth, perfectly credible to anyone who had not known him before his final permanent emigration to the United States. I began to feel a bit queasy, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

Whom did he hurt by this deception? Obviously, the many public services (based upon a fraudulent armed forces record and a non-existent Bachelor's Degree at the "prestigious London School of Economics") he performed in San Francisco were real enough. The MBE presented to him as part of the 2006 New Year's Honours List was also genuine; his name appears on the official list. He got that for fund raising, this man that left two women struggling to raise children on their own with creditors clamouring for payment in the wake of his several failed businesses.

Still, it seems to me pointless to wound his widow, the starry-eyed old soldiers of his officers' club, his bereft sister, and my eldest half-sister who wants to believe Daddy was a hero. Oh heavens, luv, so do I...

So here, anonymously, I state for the record: My father was a man of many fine qualities, hobbled by alcoholism and dysfunctional parenting. It breaks my heart to think of how badly he wanted to be a high-ranking, widely admired retired soldier and the lies upon lies needed to make that a reality for him. For the sake of his survivors, I will hold my peace for now. For the sake of his descendants and the man or men who actually earned those medals that they carried in great state in his funeral procession, I will gather the facts of his life together and wait for a few people to die.

Anthony Quinn was asked what he would like God to say when he got to heaven. He replied, "I understand." Oh Dad. I hope that's what God said to you.

A rather more fitting epitaph for my father who used to sing this.

The Beloved Passer-by

My father vanished from my life sometime during the year I was twelve. He had pulled the vanishing act a number of times before, so it was difficult to tell that he had really gone for good. When I was eight, he ran off to Boston with another woman, but he still sent Christmas gifts, so I assumed he was off on one of his lengthy business trips. He reconciled with my mother and rejoined the family when I was ten. My maternal grandfather had died a few weeks before, leaving a small legacy which my mother gave to my father to invest in a kitchen-designing business which promptly failed. At age eleven, I was now old enough to realize that my parents weren't happy and to know that the odor on his breath in the morning was alcohol. We spent that summer basically waiting for him to leave. He left in the autumn, the creditors closed in, and my mother, on legal advice, took out an ad saying she was not responsible for her husband's debts. He phoned a few times during the following year, usually in the small hours of the morning, asking to speak to me. Finally, in exasperation, my mother told him to not phone at all if he couldn't do so at a decent hour. The calls stopped.

A little over a year after he left, Judy Collins appeared on a variety show singing this song:
Luckily, I was alone in the house. I was ambushed by a storm of weeping, and said, for the last time: "Daddy."

My mother took out Canadian citizenship under her maiden name when I was sixteen. It was then that I learned that my father had been a father of three when he met her. My eldest half-sister was five when he left; her brother was three and her baby sister less than a year. My mother told me that they had been unable to marry because of his first marriage, "...but I felt married." I wandered around, saying to myself, "I'm a bastard, I'm a bastard..." not in shame, but in awe, and a good helping of teen-aged melodrama.

During my first trip to England when I was nineteen, we stayed in the same house in Muswell Hill where my parents had often visited in the year before their emigration to Canada. One night, I had a vivid dream about my father and awoke in tears, convinced that he had died. Well, he was an alcoholic and a smoker, and had had more than his share of life-threatening accidents due to the former, so it seemed feasible.

In my mid-twenties, I was awakened at three o'clock in the morning by a long-distance phone-call. The operator asked me to wait, but there was nobody there.

Not long after, I embarked on a Master's degree in Education, emphasis on creative arts in learning. During my studies, I came across a poem by Marie-Claire Blais entitled "L'ami":
. . . Et quand venait Avril, l'homme rentrait chez nous,
C'était souvent à la fin d'une fraîche journée . . . .

Ce n'est qu'un passant bien-aimé, disait nos méres
Mais cet homme venait chez nous, il baisait notre front
A la dérobée
Et s'éloignait aussitôt pendant que sommeillant doucement
Nos visions...

(. . . And when April came, the man would come into our place
It was often at the end of a cool day . . . .

It is nothing more than a beloved passer-by, said our mothers
But this man would come to our place, he would brush his lips furtively across our foreheads
And would leave as soon as dreams sweetened our sleep...)

This poem so reminded me of my father, who even when he lived with us, seemed to have banished himself to the outskirts of our lives, and I responded with a blank verse poem in pentameter, ending with an Alexandrine. (I was experimenting with poetic forms at the time, and forgive me in advance, I'm no Marie-Claire Blais):

Message to the Friend After Reading Marie-Clair Blais
When you left for the first time, I saw you
Sitting on the porch as we drove away
I wept without knowing why. Packages
Would arrive by post and every time
We took a trip, I unwittingly broke
My mother's heart by watching for you at
Each corner and station, for it had seemed
Your habit to appear without warning with gifts.

When you came back, I ran into your arms
And you swung me up, stepping into the
Dark kitchen and knocking over the milk
Bottles. That's how it always seemed to be,
Beloved passer-by, we reached toward
Each other with the joy and eagerness
Of long absence, tinged with awkwardness
Of strangeness. You knew me so well and so little.

When you left for the last time, you kissed me
Clumsily, slipping two chocolate bars and
Two magazines under my pillow. I
Crouched in my bed, not daring, not bearing
To see your car drive into the dawn. In
The dark, I choked back the chocolate like
Bitter pills. Later, I blacked out each line
In my diary meticulously.

Did you mean to wake me? I think you were
A bit of a glutton for pathos with
No appetite for pain. I think that I'm my
Father's daughter. I'd like you to know that
I knew that you loved me, never doubted
You loved me, but that each fresh failure, each
Perceived rejection when you attempted
Reconnection sapped your courage. It's quite
All right, I have a piece of you in safekeeping.

A few years ago, when I took up researching my family history in earnest, I realized I could track down my half-siblings. I sent Christmas cards to my half-brother and a first cousin, saying who I was and emphasizing that I didn't expect a reply. Considering I'd just dropped the psychological equivalent of a bomb on Colchester, they took my overtures graciously. Very graciously. It turned out my father had wived it wealthily in California not much more than a year after I had last seen him driving away. He had a condo with a boat mooring on San Francisco Bay. He had been awarded a MBE for fundraising, for heaven's sake, pretty rich, considering the financial circumstances in which he left my mother. And he had not told a soul that he had a family in Canada. He had divorced his first wife, but, as far as I can tell, my mother is unaware of this. They gave me his phone number and address. My half-sister told me to call him. My paternal aunt suggested that I shouldn't. In the end, I decided that I'm not difficult to track down, and if he had truly wanted to reconnect, he would have.

He didn't. My half-niece messaged me through Facebook on Saturday that he was dying.
On Sunday morning, as I waited for the second message telling me he was gone (it arrived in the late afternoon), I copied pictures of him from my baby album with my digital camera, and the song that was playing in my head was not "My Father", it was my favourite Leonard Cohen tune, "Song of Bernadette", these lyrics in particular:

We've been around, we fall, we fly,
We mostly fall, we mostly run.
And every now and then we try
To mend the damage that we've done.

Tonight, tonight, I just can't rest
I've got this joy here inside my breast,
To think that I did not forget
That child, that song of Bernadette.

So many hearts, I find,
Broke like yours and mine,
Torn by what they've done and can't undo.
I just want to hold you, won't you let me hold you?
Like Bernadette would do.

Here's Jennifer Warnes singing it:

So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him.
- William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act IV, Scene ii, line 31

My father always promised us that we would live in France
We'd go boating on the Seine and I would learn to dance.
I sail my memories afar, like boats across the Seine,
And watch the Paris sunset in my father's eyes. Again. - Judy Collins